


Elysium Waits

by writerdragonfly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, F/M, M/M, Original Character Gods and Metaphysical Beings, canon compliant through 3b
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:35:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21947428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerdragonfly/pseuds/writerdragonfly
Summary: “The Old Gods used to speak of Darkness as an old friend.”The Balance of the World is thrown askew when the Nemeton in Beacon Hills in cut down. A child born of Darkness can save it, but he cannot do it alone.
Relationships: Claudia Stilinski/Sheriff Stilinski, Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 10
Kudos: 53
Collections: Steter Secret Santa 2019





	Elysium Waits

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elysiumwaits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elysiumwaits/gifts).



> Happy Holidays, elysiumwaits! 
> 
> I feel like I'm cheating with my title, but I was struggling to come up with a plot and your name inspired me so I went with it. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy! <3

# Darkness, Still Spark

**_The_** Old Gods used to speak of Darkness as if it were an old friend, an ancient companion of the Creators but not Created by them. 

Darkness was the shade in the corner and the shadow on the steps, the silence of the snow and the finality of death. 

The Old Gods did not understand Darkness but they respected it.

When the Old Gods fell and their children scattered, Darkness remembered their quiet respect and looked over them all. 

For centuries and millennia, Darkness watched and protected and mourned. 

Until one day, darkness fell and Darkness fell (and **_darkness_ ** fell.)

Darkness fell to a cold iron blade, slowly sapping at the roots of her Tree and falling to pieces. 

In her place, there was only Still. 

Still was not like Darkness except in the ways they were alike, her child both Human and More.

Still would bring back the balance, take and give.

But Still could do nothing Alone. 

Darkness, unable to guide, watched and waited from afar for Still to choose a Champion. 

  
  
  


-x-

  
  
  


If Stiles had to pick words to explain it, he would say remembered his mother in full color, his father in sepia, everyone else in black and white. 

It wasn’t that his father was less important to him than his mother, but that he felt the weight of her being beyond what he could fathom. Even after her death, he could feel the hints of her in the corner of his mind like an echo. 

  
  
  


He tried to explain it once, to some therapist he’d been asked to speak with, but it was more than “grieving” and “loss” and “memory.”

  
  
  


His father understood in a way that others didn’t, couldn’t. She was more of _something_ than anyone he’d ever known, a presence of otherworldliness even at the end of her life. A wisp of something special and unique. 

  
  
  


Stiles had never been a still child, boundless energy under his skin that wouldn’t exhaust itself no matter what he did. The medication, later, helped settle his mind into shapes, but nothing had ever completely worked and nothing could. 

He wouldn’t understand why for a long time. 

  
  
  


When Stiles is fifteen, his best friend is bitten by a werewolf and everything begins to change again. It is an act of chaos, a heavy blanket of it reverberating across the land. Hope was a hard thing to come by. 

Stiles doesn’t know this is the first lock between himself and something more until the last one falls. 

Peter Hale kills a bunch of people and rips out Kate Argent’s throat and Derek Hale—who would remain as Stiles’ first foray into realizing that gender really had no effect on the way his heart and body reacted—Derek Hale bit Jackson Whittemore and everything slowly becomes worse. 

Another lock falls, _pointed fingers at a boy with darkness in his heart,_ more bodies fall, another lock opens. 

Peter Hale breaks from death to return, and Stiles doesn’t know what it means but he knows it’s something... _different_. 

Stiles can feel it in the air now, a taste of the beyond. It frightens him, the way shadows begin to flicker at him like children waving, the way the silence feels like buzzing in his ears. 

  
  
  


The water is cool and cold and ice in his veins and _mother don’t leave me, mother, please stay mom mom mom I love you mom where’s my dad where’s my dad where’s my_ and another lock shatters against the ground. 

  
  
  


The Alpha Pack falls and falls apart and runs away and the Darach flees, and Stiles feels like he can taste her blood on his lips like a stain. 

And then there were two. 

  
  
  


Stiles has a demigod firmly stuck inside of him like a parasite, clawing at what he is and what he was (and what he will be). Stiles can feel the too thick _darkness_ bundled under his skin the way that good things used to. 

Stiles can not stop it. 

Stiles wants to scream, to yell, to destroy.

Stiles... is still. 

One lock, inside his head. 

The Nogitsune remembers the time of the Old Gods. It remembers far more than a thousand years and a thousand stories. 

_And the Old Gods spoke of Darkness like an old friend, carrying the Weight of the Balance with the Creator. Where there is Life, there is Death. Your petty squabbles of good and evil mean nothing._

  
  


Stiles would like to ignore the words stuck inside his head as he feels the Nogitsune crumble inside his first Form, destroyed by the teeth of an Old God’s descendant. 

He would like to. Instead, he is Still. 

  
  
  


The last lock falls, _there are no chains on me._

  
  
  


What Stiles knows in the days after the Nogitsune—one of the last true demigods of old—dies is this: In the Beginning, there was an End. 

Words for it had come later, names far after that. 

  
  
  


**_Before_** the earth, there were a pair of twins who felt the pull of everything equally together and apart. They fought, viciously, for the right to claim a space of their own, never willing to share. Then the Spark happened, and then they had little choice but to take charge and deal with the damage they caused. 

They were reckless and immature and did not understand the consequences, and they nearly lost it all. There was only one viable option left, one tiny sphere of creation left to share and care for. They agreed, at first, to split the difference. One would care for it for a while, then the other. 

But they nearly lost the Sphere of Creation entirely, and things had to change. 

“I am Darkness, Death, and Ending,” said the sister, making a choice. 

The brother smiled, “I am Light, Life, and Beginning.”

They pressed their Gifts together and pushed and pulled in tandem until one of them remained Darkness and one of them remained Light alone. 

Light created the Gods and Humans, who both, in turn, bestowed their own creations across the Earth. They shared and worshipped and believed in their maker, their _Creator_ until Creator became the name he knew himself by. 

Darkness took the weary and the ill and wrapped them in shadows and helped them to pass on, shaded them from the sickness of the sun and remained the opposite of her twin in all things. 

By the time the Gods became the Old Gods, Creator remembered nothing but the thrill of creation and Darkness remembered nothing but the enchantment of decay.

When Darkness took the Old Gods to their eternal rest too, their respect for her purpose left her watching after their descendants. 

It was watching them for millennia that lead her to a rarity in the World; a human whose lineage had never known an Old God’s. 

A human who Darkness fell in love with, the first in all creation to interest her. 

She stepped away from her Tree in a human form for the first time in centuries, and her brother felt her love in their connection and gifted her with Creation for the first and only time. 

  
  
  


“ _My Still Spark_ ,” she whispered to her child in a language that no mere human or god’s mouth could form, though her human love tried. 

“It means ‘my still spark,’” _Claudia_ giggled softly, and he smiled softly down at them both. 

“Krzesimir. It’s a family name.”

_Claudia_ met his gaze and smiled back.

  
  
  
  


Stiles can feel his name echoing through him in a way that is more than Human. A name and a designation both. 

  
  


He is _Still Spark_. He is _Krzesimir,_ legally. And yet, Stiles is the name he thinks matters most. 

He is more than Human but human too. He likes who he has become, _Stiles_. It is a name of choice and meaning. 

  
  
  


When he hears his mother’s story like an unspoken whisper in his head, he knows she still lives and loves but is unable to touch. His Gifts, which he has yet to understand or control, tell him that much. 

It is not thought so much as an entire picture in a single feeling, a weight of history at the back of his head. 

Stiles is the only one like himself here, the closest thing to a God that has existed since the last of the Old Gods died, but even there he would be the anomaly. Half-human, half-Darkness, nephew to the Creator of All. 

More and Less in equal measures. 

  
  
  


His father knows everything. His father, who had known that Claudia was more than human and loved her despite it and in spite of it, who now knew she still lingered in every shadow and silence and ending but couldn’t touch. 

  
  
  


Stiles didn’t know if that was better or worse a knowledge, but he would never keep her from him. 

  
  
  


Despite everything, Beacon Hills continued to decay. The rest of the world kept turning, living and dying as it always had. 

Beacon Hills hadn’t had a new life born within it since his mother’s connection to the planet died, and she stepped on the land without the protection of a human form. 

There was no balance in Beacon Hills. It had brought nothing but destruction and decay and uncontrolled darkness. 

  
  
  


Stiles could not gain control of his powers fast enough to know if he could make a difference. 

  
  
  


He needed more than himself. He needed another person, another _god,_ like him who could help him renew the Nemeton and allow his mother to take back the excess darkness she was unable to touch. It was out of balance, and he knew—he just knew—that what had happened to the other places his mother and uncle had sparked into life would happen again if he could not fix the balance disruption. 

(And neither of them could fix it themselves, not when the Creator could not spare time to recreate the Immortal Trees that spared the World from Darkness’ inherent Gifts, and Darkness could not touch the World in Beacon Hills to pull the excess away.)

  
  
  


“Stiles, they’re releasing me tomorrow, don’t worry about it. We have time to—“

“No, Dad, you don’t understand. Beacon Hills is just going to keep getting worse until I can fix it. Until I can figure out how to—“

“Everything wrong with the world is not your—“

“Except it is! It is my problem, Dad! There’s no one else who can do this, if I can’t figure out my powers fast enough, you’ll only be the next one to die.”

“God, kid,” his dad said weakly, “You don’t deserve this.”

_I know,_ Stiles thinks, but also _I don’t deserve a lot of things._

  
  
  


The thing about it is, most days Stiles really didn’t feel all that different. 

Most days he wakes up and goes about his day and nothing feels any different than it had before. 

But some days he wakes up and the air feels still and stale, the hum of electricity is quiet, the birds and the wind are devoid of motion and sound and the only thing that moves is what he physically touches at the moment. 

Some days he wakes up to find his world frozen and silent and _still_ and even when it moves again, the stutter in his chest keeps a tight grip on him for hours. 

Beacon Hills doesn’t stop being dangerous either. 

There’s an awareness he has to the shadows now, a sense of home when they creep across spaces as night falls. It’s not the same as the vampyre that bled out a family of six, the wendigo that attacks the school, or the omega that murders his way through the west side. 

He doesn’t quite know how to explain in human words. 

  
It just... _is._

**Author's Note:**

> Part two of two should be up tomorrow. <3
> 
> Please feel free to comment~!
> 
> Hit me up anywhere to harangue me into writing, talk fic, fandom, or whatever catches your fancy.  
> [Tumblr: writerdragonfly](https://writerdragonfly.tumblr.com)  
> Discord: writerdragonfly#5403  
> [Twitter: writerdragonfly ](https://twitter.com/writerdragonfly)  
> PSN & Steam: writerdragonfly


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